Brian Clegg's Blog, page 51

At Cross Purposes - Review

This is a narrow focus review: if, like me, you are fond of church music and the Anglican cathedral choral tradition (something I was introduced to age 18 on joining a Cambridge college chapel choir), read on.

Most of us are probably aware that the big cathedrals have professional organists and semi-pro choirs, working at the highest levels of musical performance. In his memoirs, Michael Smith, organist and choirmaster at Llandaff Cathedral from 1974 to 1999, gives the inside story of what was often a battle to maintain such singing standards. This might sound a touch dull - and there certainly are many small and personal events in this 400 page book, but for those who are interested there are also some fascinating stories, from a murder to legal threats, conspiracy and downright managerial incompetence.

LLandaff was unique among the Welsh cathedrals in keeping up a full scale cathedral choir contribution, singing services six days a week, with a choir of boys and men. The men, as at most major cathedrals, were paid a relative pittance for a job they loved, in theory in combination with accommodation and other opportunities, though the accommodation part was one of the many battles Smith would have with the management of the cathedral: the Dean and chapter.

In keeping the cathedral choir going through many musical successes, Smith had two big problems. One was the bizarre setup at Llandaff: the cathedral was also a parish church, and effectively operated with two separate management structures, even two choirs and totally separate services. This inevitably led to clashes of priority and finances. The other, even bigger, issue was that the management of the relationship between Smith and his employer, the Dean and chapter, was disastrous. Rather than talk about things, everything seemed to be done through letters - which usually seemed to be entirely ignored by the management side. This led to Smith's house becoming dangerously in need of repairs, a total mismatch of salary to other cathedral organists and constant battles over every little detail from who paid the phone bill to a dodgy piano. Other problems arose from the cathedral choir school, which provided the boys for the choir and whose management also seemed both to have serious issues and to be at odds with the school's role as a choir school.

What also comes through strongly is the way that Smith's devotion to a tradition remained constant while society's views gradually shifted, resulting in some unfortunate clashes, all documented here. I can relate to this change in attitude. When I was at school, I sang in a highly rated choir that provided the boys' parts for pieces performed by the Hallé Orchestra and the regime was strict. I can remember things being thrown at choir members who weren't paying attention and others getting detentions just for turning to round to see who had come into a room during a choir practice. Smith never resorted to this kind of  regime, but getting a choir to a professional level requires a professional approach, which he had both to his choirs an the music examinations he supervised - and in both cases, towards the end of his career, he was probably unfairly censured for his strictness, at one point being suspended for several months over highly inflated allegations.

Bitterness is a major part of this memoir - combining someone who, I suspect, was always going to be quite a difficult employee with terrible management, leading to a disastrous inability to communicate and get things done. Yet despite that, magnificent music continued to be made. Occasionally an inflexibility comes through that suggests this wasn't entirely one-sided. Smith was, for instance, incredibly reluctant to perform anything in Welsh, despite this being a Welsh cathedral. And he occasionally displayed the musical preferences of a different age when the big hymn books refused to print Welsh tunes because they were too lowbrow: this comes through when he considers the great Welsh tune Blaenwern more suited to a chapel than a cathedral. Yet at the same time there was no doubt that Llandaff was punching far above its weight musically thanks to Smith's efforts.

Whether he is describing conducting wonderful anthems and choral works, gadding around the country and abroad to conferences and to administer music examinations, or taking up Kleeneze sales and market research in an attempt to bolster a meagre income, there's a poignant honesty in these memoirs. It's not a laugh a minute - at times the annual cycle of events can seem to go on for ever - but if you are interested in how this great musical tradition somehow survives against remarkable odds, it's well worth reading Michael Smith's account.

At Cross Purposes is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

You can hear Michael Smith's choir in action here in a rather fuzzy recording:

Too much or too little change?

This isn't a post about Brexit per se - though I am pleased to discover that as yet the sky seems not to have fallen in - but about an interesting paradox.

I was listening to David Aaronovitch's programme about how remainers feel now, broadcast on Radio 4 last night. After a range of interviews, there was a discussion with a couple of people in the studio. One of the questions asked was whether they thought that the same result would have happened in 10 or 15 years time. As Aaronovitch pointed out it's not as obvious an outcome as you might think. The typical reaction might be 'No, because many of the older voters will have died off, so the younger voters, weighted to remain would triumph.' But, of course, it's entirely possible that as younger voters got older they might change their mind - and in 10 to 15 years, the EU might be in such a mess that withdrawing would be even more popular.

However, the paradox arose in a comment analysing why older voters might be more in favour of leaving the EU, which was put down to their being more uncomfortable with change, and so less happy about the way the UK is changing as a result of being in the EU. There could, indeed, be some truth in this. But here's the thing. Leaving the EU is change. A vote for remain was actually a vote to avoid change. Bizarrely, the argument seems to be that apparently in order to move away for change, leavers voted for change. I suspect the driver was not so much a fear of change (the classic metropolitan elite view of what happened) as a desire for change. Whether or not that change is a good thing is an entirely different issue - but change we certainly got. (Unless we're a Labour party leader, of course.)

Are smart meters really smart?

My meter is dumb - and I like it that wayInteresting news that British Gas is finally offering the first real benefit to the consumer of having a smart meter - 9 to 5 free electricity on either Saturday or Sunday to people on the appropriate plan. And that's great, possibly - but it also needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

I've always been a touch suspicious of the way smart meters are being sold. We have been told that they enable consumers to be more aware of their electricity use, and hence to save money. But I'm not really not convinced that seeing that your kettle uses more electricity when it's boiling water than when it's off is really a great surprise to anyone - even if we can actually see the smart meter while boiling the kettle, which often won't be the case.

In practice, what these meters are primarily about is enabling the energy supply companies to get more of a real time monitoring of individual usage, which in principle could benefit the consumer, but is primarily aimed at being able to extract more cash.

In principle, the British Gas 'all you can eat for free' on a weekend day of your choice 9 to 5 (odd times for the weekend) is a clear benefit to the owner (though it hardly encourages good green thinking - 'Hey let's use as much energy as we can today, it's free!'). And you certainly would save money, estimated to average £60 a year, compared with being on the same tariff without it. However, bear in mind that most households can save between £200 and £300 a year by switching supplier - so it looks suspiciously like offering lollipops to tie the consumer into paying more.

Coalition: David Laws - review

By a genuine coincidence, I ended up reading David Laws' inside account of the five years of Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition in the UK immediately after reading the book form of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister - still hilarious after all these years.

Although Coalition hasn't got anywhere near as much in the way of funny bits as the satire, it is genuinely readable despite its wrist-busting 600+ pages. Laws doesn't have a particularly outstanding writing style, but he comes across as genuine and the book is well structured, in relatively short, themed chunks that tend to span across months or years, rather than trying to do the whole thing in a single, chronological bore-fest. (The effectiveness only breaks down at the end, where it could have done with some serious editor's blue pencil, but that's really only in the short postscript.)

I think two things are particularly fascinating. One is to get a better feel for the characters, many of them still in the Conservative government, as people. We get to used to treating politicians as if they were Spitting Image puppets, simply voicing their extreme views and then being put back in the cupboard, resulting in the kind of extremely negative personal comments made to no one's advantage during the recent EU referendum. Here we see people like David Cameron, George Osborne, Michael Gove and Theresa May more as actual people - we see much rounder personalities: if they're funny, how conservative they and, interestingly, how socially liberal some of them are. Perhaps most fascinating of these are Cameron - who comes across sometimes worryingly like Jim Hacker in Yes Prime Minister - Osborne, displaying a surprisingly human side and Gove - who comes across as both likeable and downright weird, prone to distinctly odd behaviour. Obviously, given turns of events since, it is also fascinating to see the trajectory with which many of the key players went into the EU referendum (which was obviously after the book was written, though thoughts about it coming in the future are often referenced).

The other thing that is interesting is, if we believe Laws, how much they all genuinely put a huge amount off effort into keeping a workable coalition going, and achieved a fair number of positive things between 2010 and 2015. There is also a sad inside view of the pretty much total destruction of the Liberal Democrat party as a result, in part, of the electorate simply not understanding how much they had contributed to the coalition.

Of course, this is one person's view - but Laws seems to have been well-placed to give it and it shows us everything from the workings of the senior civil service (capable of the odd Sir Humphrey moment, despite mostly coming across as very efficient) through to the practicalities of government most of us never get to see. Recommended.

Coalition is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

The brilliance of stuff that just works

The ticket as it popped up on my
phone (original not pixilated)A few years ago, when I first moved over to using Apple, a friend of mine who likes to get up to his elbows in the technology, tweaking this and twerking that, said 'I could never live with that walled garden.' He wasn't talking about some rural pleasure grounds, but rather the way that Apple rigidly controls what does what on its devices.

I can see the point if you are the sort of person who likes to nurgle around changing settings and writing macros and linking box X to widget Y to make things just the way you want them. And I probably was that person in my 20s. But now I just want things to work together, and with a few notable exceptions, the good thing about using Apple is that it all does.

I just had an example of that. I had received an e-ticket notification from Eurostar. On the email it said 'click here to download your ticket'. I did this on my iMac. Up popped a web window showing the ticket. This had a link on it saying 'Click here to send the ticket to your wallet.' Yeah, right, I thought. So I clicked the link. And five seconds later, there was a ticket sitting in the Wallet app on my phone.

I'm not saying this wouldn't necessarily work as well with Android or Windows - it may well do so. But for me, that ability to click a link on my desktop and have a ticket appear as if by magic in the wallet on the phone is why the walled garden can be a lovely place to live.

Say after me 'cost and price are not the same thing'

I saw this on that unique source of information, Facebook, the other day, accompanying an image of some generic paracetamol (acetaminophen):

This paracetamol is 25p but it's as low as 16p in Home Bargains. When you choose to get paracetamol for 'free' from the pharmacist or GP it actually costs the taxpayer and NHS about £10. If you want to help save the NHS choose to refuse free paracetamol when you can...

It certainly would be silly to get an over-the-counter painkiller on prescription unless you need large supplies for a chronic condition. However, what raised my 'failure to understand numbers' antennae was the bit that says 'it actually costs the taxpayer and NHS about £10'.

Now it's certainly true that the price of a prescription to the patient in the UK (unless they qualify for free ones) is £8.40. But price and cost are not the same thing. When you buy something in a shop, the price is the amount you pay - the cost is what the shopkeeper (or in this case, indirectly, the NHS) pays. In the case of paracetamol, it is going to be a fraction of the price.

Prescriptions have an unusual pricing model, in that the price to the consumer is fixed, whatever the cost to the NHS. So the cost might be 10p for those painkillers or £10,000 for some leading-edge treatment: you still pay the same £8.40, or nothing at all if you get prescriptions free.

Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that, with both bulk discounts and the cost to the NHS of dispensing a prescription (though the incremental difference of the cost of a single prescription is likely to be pretty small). However, the main thing is to remember is that just because a packet of paracetamols would be priced at £8.40 if you bought them as a prescription - making it more sensible to buy them off the shelf - and you will save the NHS some money if you buy them yourself instead of using a free prescription - this doesn't mean that your get them free costs the NHS £8.40.

Banking baloney

Branches like this may be doomed
(image from Wikipedia)As Bohr almost said, forecasting is difficult, especially about the future - in fact it's pretty well always wrong. And never more so when we try to predict cataclysmic change. As I discussed in Dice World , the problem is that the systems we are usually trying to predict are so large and complex (and often mathematically chaotic) that we are almost always blindsided by major changes. So I raised an eyebrow when I saw an article claiming that within a decade, retail banks will be dead.

It's certainly true, as the writer suggests, that bank branches are closing because we are doing more online banking, but I think there is far too much conservatism about retail banking to see such a massive change as the end of the familiar banks in ten years. Look how long after Europe was paying its bills with direct debits the USA was still tediously printing off cheques to pay bills. Not to mention the time it took for chip and pin to be available over there.

The author of the post envisages that 'thе biggеѕt bаnkѕ in thе world in 2025 will bе technology companies'. This may be true, in the sense that they are edging into financial services through things like ApplePay - but it's extremely unlikely. And even if it is true, it doesn't mean that 'retail banks will be dead'. Nor does it mean that 'the biggest banks in your country will be technology companies', as we still have huge country-to-country variation in retail banks. You don't see many Lloyds and NatWest branches outside the UK, for instance.

Although bankers aren't trusted, we still invest significant trust in familiar high street banking brands, plus brands like Virgin and the supermarkets which have a similar feeling of national acceptance. We are far less likely to trust Google or Apple with our money. Handling payment transactions is one thing. Handling our bank accounts, particularly current accounts and mortgages, is another.

I am not saying we won't see a gradual shift away from today's retail banks to a wider range of options. But I think the reports of retail banking's (future) death are greatly exaggerated.

Farewell to consumer electronics laptops

My defunct Sony laptop, designed, as the label says,
for Windows 98There has been an interesting evolution in the world of laptops - one that you might not even have noticed. It's a kind of mass extinction.

Back in the old days, when luggable PCs and laptops first entered the market (yes, I can remember than far back), there were two distinct types of manufacturer involved in electronics. Computer makers, mostly American - whether traditional (IBM, say) or newly minted (Compaq, Dell etc.) made computers - while consumer manufacturers, mostly from the far east, made things like TV sets and stereos.

It was a mystery why those consumer electronics giants never got into computing in a big way, but for some reason they only seriously took on one segment of the market - laptops. And they were very good at it. The first (actually, the only) laptop I ever bought was a top of the range Sony. It lasted me 10 years and was brilliant. It was also the consumer manufacturers (as opposed to the business-dominated computer firms) who realised it might be a good idea to bring out low cost netbooks and who, apart from Apple, dominated the stylish end of the market.

The big three were Sony (always the top end option), Samsung and Toshiba. But Sony pulled out of the market a few years ago, then Samsung followed suit. And now Toshiba is ceasing to make consumer laptops (they say they intend to stay in the business market - but it would seem an odd long-term decision). All three are now gone.

What has happened? It's certainly true that desktop computer sales have plummeted, while Apple and Microsoft's high end tablets have nibbled away at a segment of the laptop market. But laptop sales remain pretty solid with around 165 million laptops and Chromebooks selling in 2015. So why this very focussed move away? I can only suggest that the consumer electronics companies have never been comfortable with the sheer complexity and support requirements of PCs - far greater than, say, a TV set. Nor, more importantly, have they liked the need to deal so closely with a third party - Microsoft or lately Google - for their operating systems.

This may come down to control. In the old days when there was a good range of MP3 players before phones took over the role, Sony's were always notable because their software took over. This wasn't such a surprise with iPods, because Apple operated in a closed world, but it didn't matter because they did it slickly. However, almost every non-Apple player treated the MP3 player as a storage device, pop your MP3s on it with, say, Windows Media Player and you were away. To use Sony's MP3 players, you had to use Sony's proprietary (and awful) software to handle all the interactions.

It seems companies like Sony didn't like giving over control to Windows, or whatever is running on the associated computer and needed to impose their grip, allegedly to make things easier, but in practice making their products less useful. And it wouldn't be too much of a surprise if the demise of the consumer electronics laptop was similarly because the companies involved were used to controlling their own devices through their own software and never became comfortable with the separate hardware and software PC model.

Whatever the reason, it's a shame.

Stone age observatories or motel of the mysteries?

Terrified prehistoric (well, 1980s) adolescents in
West Kennet Long BarrowI was interested to see in New Scientist that 'prehistoric tombs may have doubled as star-gazing observatories,' because this reminded me of one of my favourite books from the 1970s.

The idea put forward in the article is that in the extended, narrow chamber of a long barrow or passage tomb, an observer would peer in darkness down to a small fraction of sky and be able to see stars around dawn that would otherwise be washed out by sky light. And it's certainly possible. I particularly liked the quote from Fabio Silva of the University of Wales, Trinity St. David, conjuring up an adolescent initiation rite:

Imagine a young boy forced to spend the night in the passage – probably scared to death. In the morning he would see this star rise days before the rest of his tribe. That may have been presented as secret knowledge.

The reason I find this so delightful is that it has immensely strong echoes of that book I mentioned at the beginning of this post, which was called Motel of the Mysteries. Written by David Macaulay, the idea was simple but excellent - a couple of thousand years in the future, archaeologists excavating the ruins of America dig up an old motel (the Toot N C'mon Motel, to be precise). With no way of understanding its uses they assume, for example, that the toilet seat is a ceremonial collar for ritual purposes and that the TV set was an altar.

Of course, Dr Silva could be spot on. But I would just love it if his interpretations had the same delightful inaccuracies as the interpretations of the motel. And it is entirely possible that it's the case.

The book was out of print for a long time, but is now available again. You can get a feel for it (though the real thing is much better) from some of the text an illustrations, which are available online here.

The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick - review

Although a huge fan of science fiction, I've never been overly fond of the New Wave authors of the 1960s. Their ideas were remarkable - but their stories tended to be relentlessly bleak and unrewarding - a bit like post-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd without the wonderful music. And there's no better example than Philip K. Dick. (It's Kindred, since you ask.) The sheer inventiveness of Dick's stories come through in the number of 'adaptations' of his work, from Blade Runner (taken from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) to The Man in the High Castle. But the negative side of his work comes across in those inverted commas round 'adaptations' - the stories usually need a lot of adapting to be less odd and nihilistic to work for a wider audience.

I knew nothing about Dick himself before reading The Divine Madness, a kind of psychoanalytic biography that attempt to retro-analyse Dick's strange life and thinking. His upbringing was never going to leave him normal. His twin sister (the book says 'fraternal twin' as if he could have had an identical twin sister, which is odd) died of malnutrition, as Dick almost did, when their mother didn't manage to feed them properly. For some reason, Dick's mother then seems to have brought him up blaming him for his sister's death and telling him he should have died too. Alarmingly, they even put Dick's name on the gravestone. Throw in a mostly absent and uncaring father and it's not entirely surprising the result was a troubled young man.

All the evidence in the book suggests that Dick had a serious mental illness - from apparently staging a burglary at his home (the book's hypothesis as Dick never admitted it) to paranoid delusions - compounded by massive prescription (and other) drug taking. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this slim volume was the occasional analysis of Dick's stories and novels. I had read many of them (though I wasn't fond of New Wave, I read a lot, because I felt I ought to) and it was genuinely interesting to see how a couple of major underlying themes, revolving around the loss of his sister, and the idea that the world we experience is not reality and reality will occasionally poke through and show itself, are replayed time and again. The book also explores effectively why Dick's female characters are almost always evil or unsympathetic.

What I was less sure about was the heavy lashings of psychoanalysis in the book. Freud's work has already been pretty well comprehensively dismissed as pseudoscience, and there is little evidence that later practitioners had any more scientific basis for their work. The Divine Madness, written by Kyle Arnold, an assistant professor of psychiatry, lays the analysis on thick. One clear example of this is when the author claims that the song-game parents play with their babies and toddlers 'Rockabye Baby' plays out a death wish in which the parents secretly want to commit infanticide. Unfortunately, as anyone who has had children this age knows, the game, like the similar action game 'The Farmer goes a-clip', is all about anticipation of a safe drop - it's the nursery equivalent of a rollercoaster ride. It's not about parents secretly wishing to finish off their little ones, any more than theme park ride owners secretly want to kill large numbers of people in vehicle crashes.

There are times it is difficult not to wince when reading the book - and I certainly couldn't include it as a review on the popular science website due to the lack of science - but it does give some fascinating insights into the mental processes and life of a very inventive but tortured science fiction writer.

The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.